A dog and a kid walk into a bar...

I lived in working class Dublin for about eight years and quite often woke up on Sunday mornings feeling a little dusty. I would hobble around the house for a few hours and then head out like a hungry bear in search of food. On one memorable occasion I stumbled into a suburban pub that was advertising carvery. 

It was about 3pm when I opened the door and stared into its murky interior. This being the days before the smoking ban, the air was thick with nicotine and the odour of over boiled potatoes. As I stood in the doorway trying to focus I was suddenly whacked on the shin by a kid on a skateboard. As I regained balance and turned to watch him skate past me I was hit again by his two siblings who were chasing after him, screaming their young heads off in a sugar fuelled frenzy.

I grew accustomed to the light and gazed at the Babylonian scene within. Each table consisted of three and sometimes four generations of a family, with granny nursing a gin and tonic while her daughter and son in law got stuck into pints and vodka as though the Government was going to bring in prohibition at midnight. At their feet were buggies containing children too young to walk, while the ones who could were racing around the pub like football hooligans rampaging through a City Centre.

The tables were littered with the detritus of a hundred unfinished dinners.

I turned on my heels and headed home. Swearing to myself that I would never again darken the door of an establishment that let minors consume Coca Cola. I was the sort of curmudgeonly old git who would write to airlines requesting that they create a separate space, preferably in the hold, for families travelling with infants. Despite a rumoured policy of never seating a single male traveller beside kids, it always seemed to happen to me.

I grew to avoid places were small kids would be found, like the Zoo and the sweet section in Supermarkets.

That was of course, until I had a kid myself. I am a poacher who has become a gamekeeper. A former addict who has come clean and I speak with the sort of certainty that only comes from the recently converted.

I realise of course, that children are like farts. You only really like your own. But that doesn’t stop me from getting offended when a café owner or publican fails to see my daughter for the sweet little angel she is. This is ironic, because I knew she’s a strong willed little general who often exasperates me with her behaviour at home. Yet when we take her out we have this naïve belief that she will sit at the table and behave like a child from a Dickens novel, who is seen and not heard, or better still like an adult.

This was never a problem in Melbourne. Pubs there always sell food and are set up with high chairs and children’s food options while cafes offer baby chinos and mini croissants. We took it for granted at the time but Australia in general is a very child friendly place.

I wish I could say the same for Edinburgh. It is a much older city of course, filled with cobble stoned laneways and basement cafes. This makes it very awkward when you’re pushing a buggy, which if nothing else, has given me an indication of the difficulties that people in wheel chairs must face on a daily basis.

But they don’t just make physical access difficult. Many places are openly hostile to our small friends. 

On our first weekend here, we were turned away from three restaurants and stumbled around our neighbourhood like Joseph and Mary in search of a manger. Finally, we were welcomed into the arms of Pizza Express who have cornered the family market. They openly welcome prams and offer cheap children’s menus, which has the amazing effect of stopping the parents from realising that they have just paid eight quid for a bottle of beer.

We have expanded our knowledge of child friendly establishments and I have to admit that I prefer taking our daughter to places where her antics will be matched and bettered by a hundred other kids. When you are nervous about your child’s potential behaviour it is best to bathe yourself in the comforting blanket of others in the same situation.

I am fairly sanguine about all of this, having previously been, as a said, a purveyor of adult only eating establishments. But one thing does annoy about the places here that won’t let kids in. They are quite happy to have dogs on their premises. In Australia, as I’m sure it is in all civilised countries, dogs are not allowed in places that serve food, for reasons I would have thought were obvious. That doesn’t apply in Scotland. Pubs in particular allow dogs but ban children. I was in a local establishment one night when I noticed two of the largest hounds on the planet ambling around as though they owned the place. One of them came over and sniffed me contemptibly as though I’d brought in something foul on my shoe.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m nervous around dogs but I also don’t like them sticking their noses into my dinner and scrambling around my legs to pick up the crumbs that fall from my table.

Last week, I visited my local pub to watch football. I asked the barman if it would be OK if I brought my puppy in next time I visited. He said, “of course, why do you ask”. I mentioned that he had a sign in the window saying No Children Allowed and wanted to know if the policy applied to all species or just humans. He looked at me with narrowed eyes and moved on. We live in a strange world were people think more of dogs than children.   

Scotland the Brave?

My grandfather was sixteen when the Easter Rising took place in Dublin. His adventures in that April week in 1916 are the stuff of Boy’s Own stories, involving shoot outs, jumping on and off moving trains and escaping to Liverpool on a coal boat.

I found all these details in Ireland’s national archives and the image of my grandfather it portrayed was very different to the kindly old man I remember in my childhood. He was a revolutionary none the less and did his bit to ease Ireland out of the suffocating cloak of colonisation and to give the Irish people the opportunity to make a balls up of their own country. While there are many revisionists who seek to question the wisdom of Irish independence, I think my grandad’s generation were right to take up arms against perfidious Albion.  He was a working class Catholic and they didn’t have many rights and privileges in the United Kingdom at the time. His religion would have barred him from high office in politics, law and the civil service and his social class and nationality would make him a 2nd or even a 3rd class citizen in his own country. His language and culture were also strangled by an occupier who didn’t understand the people it occupied and showed no inclination to learn.

Add to this the risk that he might be conscripted into the imperial armies that were busy slaughtering each other at the time. So like Serbs, Poles and many other people in those turbulent times in World history, Ireland took the first baby steps towards independence.

My grandfather’s adventures came to mind this week as the Scottish independence referendum reaches its conclusion.  I find myself temporarily living in this country at a time of potentially momentous change and ironically I’m entitled to vote and to be a part of it.

I fear however that my vote won’t make a difference. Despite news that the polls are closing and that the Yes campaign is gaining ground, I personally don’t think it has a prayer. The Scots will vote no and agree to be governed by Westminster ad infinitum despite the lust with which they belt out ‘Flower of Scotland’ before football matches.

It is a classic debate between Hope and Fear, similar to Obama v McCain in 2007. Hope won on that occasion because the global financial crisis intervened and queered the pitch. The only kind of similar event that could make Hope win in Scotland would be the discovery of a secret pipeline taking all their oil to England. Unfortunately in these debates, fear still cheats and wins more hands.

But the Yes campaign will fail for a more insidious reason. People just don’t care enough. The birth of most countries is painful and comes out of revolution or social change, not polite conversation or intelligent debate. South Sudan did not come about through a vote and some friendly banter. Croatia and Slovenia were delivered with the rumble of tanks in the background and even that great example of velvet revolution, the break-up of Czechoslovakia, came about through the social turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which reminds me, what happened the ‘Os’ when the Czechs and Slovaks went their separate ways? Are they wondering the Carpathian Mountains looking for a homeland?

Scotland has no such impetus. It has been part of the United Kingdom since 1707 when an ill-advised attempt to get into the Central American colonisation game led the country to virtual bankruptcy and caused the Scots to go cap in hand to their former enemies in London. Thus they became the only country in history to be become a colony after trying to make some other poor souls become one.

They have been relatively quiet for the three hundred years since, apart from the occasional attempt to pull down the goal posts at Wembley. Ireland on the other hand had a revolution every generation after her Union with Britain. And the Scots share a language (sort of, some of the accents here are impenetrable) and a physical island with the English.

So will they have the confidence to cast off and sail for the promised land of independence? I fear not. Inertia is a powerful emotion. The London press and particularly the organs owned by a Mr R Murdoch are running a scare campaign around money, oil proceeds and currency.

The mistake the Yes campaign made was to allow the campaign to become about money. A people are more than an economy after all. They should have concentrated on the emotional stuff. But I’ll be voting Yes nonetheless. Even though I do feel like a lodger in the house of a married couple who have asked for my opinion on their possible divorce. The Edinburgh Festival has just finished and there were a couple of good jokes about the referendum. Like how Scotland used to have lots of oil but used it all up with their deep fat frying. How England and Scotland should stay together at least until the Welsh grow up.

But most of the debate has been dull as dishwater. It’s none of my business but I wish there was more passion in this campaign. There are no flag waving rallies through the streets, no bonfire vigils outside parliament, no scuffles between opposing supporters. It’s all too civilised for what is such a momentous decision. Ireland’s independence came after a campaign that had been building since the 1860s. But they do reference Ireland occasionally in this campaign. We were the first to weaken the chains on the British Empire. India and many parts of Africa followed us.

My grandfather played a small part in the break-up of the British empire. I’ll do my best to carry on his legacy on the 18th September. I wonder how many Scots will be brave enough to vote with their hearts and not their heads. Will Scotland the Brave step forward? Unfortunately I don’t think so.

Our Friends in the North

I lived in Luxembourg in 1995 when it was awarded the title of “European
City of Culture”. This was greeted with a lot of cynicism from within the
ex-pat community (who made up more than 50% of the city’s population). We
were of the opinion that a pot of yogurt contained more culture than you
would find in that place. Despite its wealth, the Luxembourg authorities
where keener on building swimming pools that were 1cm short of fifty meters
and therefore couldn’t be used for official meetings and bowling alleys in
windswept suburbs than they were in opera houses or theater.


From a literature perspective, the only evidence of notable achievement was
a plaque in the town square to commemorate the fact that Victor Hugo had
spent a night there on his way to his holidays in Alsace. In short, the
culture there was so shallow, you could paddle in it.


I say all this to mark the difference between that and my current abode.
I’m now living in Edinburgh and arrived just before the annual festival
kicked off. There is so much culture available here that it’s a little
overwhelming. The International Arts Festival hosts opera, ballet and the
other elements of the arts that are understood by few but patronised by
many with more money than sense.


The official festival also hosts ground breaking plays and (let’s be
honest) a lot of rubbish. The key it seems is to see a performance in the
early weeks that will take off and become a West End or Broadway hit. Then
you can smugly say to your friends that you saw the next Les Miserables
when it was being performed in front of 4 people in a public toilet. The
only problem with this strategy is that you either have to see a lot of
shows or be right on top of the word of mouth process.


The upshot is that if you want to see a show in the third or fourth week of
the festival and can get a ticket, then it’s probably not worth seeing. All
the good stuff will have built momentum and will sell out. This is a
particular problem for the likes of me who have a day job. I can’t sit
outside box offices reading reviews of last night’s shows, like the
thousands of American tourists who throng the narrow medieval streets of
city centre.


But the official festival is now completely swamped by the Fringe Festival.
Google any comedian you have ever seen (apart from the dead ones) and
chances are they will be in Edinburgh at the moment. The sheer number of
performers and shows means that they kick off at 10am in the morning and
take up every venue available from Churches to phone boxes.


The fringe festival has become so big that it now has its own offshoots,
like the free fringe and the “we’re too cool to be part of the bigger
thing” festival. And if that’s not enough, there is also the International
Book Festival and a couple of music festivals going on at the same time.


I may of course have arrived at an opportune time and Edinburgh is a
cultural wasteland for the rest of the year. But somehow I doubt this. You
can’t laugh for a month and then keep a sour look on your face for the rest
of the year.


Otherwise, it feels a bit odd to be back living in the UK, twenty years or
so since I left it after my last stint of paying taxes to keep the Queen in
Corgis and the British Army in tanks. There is an air of familiarity about
the place that reminds me of my time in London in the early nineties. But
there is also much that has changed. Coffee shops have replaced the old
greasy spoon cafes, gastro pubs have taken the place of the smoked filled
dens I used to drink in and the high streets offer a greater choice of food
than an Indian and Chinese takeaway.


But the things that are the same surprise me most. The most obvious is that
quaint British obsession with queuing. If you stood behind a friend on the
street, you would soon have twenty others standing behind you, all working
on the assumption that there must be something at the front worth queuing
for.


You see this best at bus stops where strict protocol exists. Most people
stand in a straight line even if this means snaking out the back of the bus
shelter and standing in the pouring rain. Occasionally somebody breaks off
to have a cigarette or to corral a noisy child. Their position in the queue
will be memorised by everybody else and their place preserved, even if this
means waiting for them to finish their fag when the bus arrives. This is
very unlike Australia where the arrival of a mode of public transport
causes an outbreak of panic and an exhibition of Darwinism involving
survival of the fittest.


This process gets disrupted in August when thousands of tourists arrive for
the festival. A party of Germans tried to get onto a bus I was queuing for
on Saturday and approached it from the right hand side, oblivious to the
fact that fifteen Scots were in an orderly queue on the left. The resulting
standoff reminded me of the siege of Tobruk as the Scots Guard stared
menacingly across no man’s land as the stubborn Germans tried to advance.
Thankfully, the driver stepped in and put the tourists in their place.


The message seems to be getting through because the queues outside the
comedy and theatre venues are a picture of orderliness. Americans and
mainland Europeans line up like soldiers on parade as they wait to be
entertained. Most shows pride themselves on their anarchic nature. It’s
ironic that their audiences are so orderly about getting in.


There is a lot of culture here. It’s just a shame that that the beer isn’t
as good as Luxembourg. But that’s another story.

Farewell and thanks for all the fish

All good things must come to an end. And so this will probably be my last blog post from Australia. 

I’ll be leaving these shores on July 12^th, seven years and one week since I arrived. Being made redundant has forced us into making decisions that we’ve been thinking about but putting off for a long time. My wife and I have discussed leaving this country often in the last few years. Work was grinding both of us down and our two year old has cousins in Ireland and New Zealand, but none here.

So we kind of knew that Melbourne would not be our long term home. But that doesn’t make leaving here any easier. We’re heading to Edinburgh where I’ve secured a nice contract job for a year. After that we’re planning to settle down in New Zealand but as the last couple of months have shown me, you can’t take anything for granted.

Things were pretty hectic for the last few weeks. We sold our car and all our furniture to minimise our possessions in preparation for the move. We got one of those self help books that tell you that you should only have ten possessions and they should all be capable of fitting into carryon luggage on a plane.

This has been the hardest thing for me. I’ve moved country four times in my life and on each occasion I’ve bundled all my possessions into boxes and shipped them to my new home. When I came to Australia seven years ago, I filled six tea chests with my book, DVD and CD collections. Nothing was discarded, not even the “Now that’s what I call music 847” CD that came free with a Sunday newspaper. But we collect possessions for reasons that go beyond usefulness. I spent a year of my life alone in Luxembourg. Television was rubbish (although it might have been better if I could speak French or German) and there was no Internet to keep me amused.

So I spent a lot of time rearranging my CD collection. Sometimes by Artist name, sometimes by Album name or genre.  But more often than not I’d arrange them by emotional connection. The folk albums from my teenage years when a protest song would grab me with passion. The CDs I was given as gifts in the early days of relationships before bitterness made music melancholy. The angry industrial rock music I bought in my thirties as I reevaluated my early innocence.

This time we’ve decided to be more conservative and brutal so as to minimise the amount of stuff we’re taking with us, if for no other reason than we’ll have to move it again in twelve months’ time and it’s a lot more expensive to ship goods from Australia than it was to bring them here.

The CDs were the first things to go, lovingly collected since I got my first CD player in 1991. I have them all on my Ipod and to be honest can’t remember when I last played one. But I was sad to see them go none the less. I had to send them to the dump because finding a home for several hundred angst ridden country and western albums is not easy.

Next up was my DVD collection. At least this time I was able to save the disks and have them now in a single case. The covers and sleeve notes have also made their way to the dump. This also upset me however. They used to say that the definition of a working class person is that they had more DVDs on their bookshelf than books. But I think the advent of classic mini-series like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”, not to mention all those Scandinavian noir programs, has led the middle class to accumulate collections that rival the 19^th century leather bound classics that used to line book shelves.

However, I don’t want to appear as a complete bogan. I also had an extensive book collection that I’ve been building up since I was a teenager. I had these proudly displayed at home, mainly to impress visitors with my eclectic taste and intellectual prowess. I had to face the reality that I’ve rarely read a book twice. So these were all boxed up and sent to a charity. Hopefully somebody in Melbourne will get to enjoy all those books on the Irish Potato famine and Hurling.

In the last week we sold our furniture and car. I’ve never been much of a salesman but thankfully the Internet takes care of that.  You just have to take a picture of your stuff and to put it up on Ebay or similar sites and to let it do its thing. It’s fun and a little weird to watch people bidding on your bed but at least it gave us a little cash flow for the move.

So we squeezed down our possessions into four suitcases and a couple of tea chests that are following us by airfreight.

Thankfully the apartment we’ve found in Edinburgh is furnished because I couldn’t face spending time in Ikea.

So finally it was time to get on the plane and say goodbye with a heavy heart. Somehow I knew that I would feel this way until we’d crossed the equator and excitement about our new life would kick in. 

While I knew Melbourne would not be my final home, it is still a fantastic place to live, with fantastic restaurants, sport and public transport. But all good things must come to an end. I’ll certainly miss all the great friends I made but at least I’ll now be closer to all the old friends I had in Ireland and the UK. 

I am a restless soul and want to see as much of the world as possible and to immerse myself in different cultures. Scotland is next on the list. I’ll keep posting from there, hopefully more regularly than I have been.

There is a light beyond these woods, do you think that we should go there and see what makes it shine?

Up In The Air

There is a scene in “Up in the air” where George Clooney, playing a guy who makes people redundant for a living, plops a folder on an office desk. He is somewhere in one of the fly over states and about to tell some sad looking character that he’s about to lose his job. The folder has a picture of a yacht and the message “Your new adventure starts now”.

The look on the” just- to-be- made- redundant” character’s face said it all. Redundancy isn’t much fun, even if you hated the place you worked at and got a good pay off. Everyone wants to do things on their own terms. It’s like being in a bad relationship. Even if you’re planning to break up but can’t work up the nerve to do it, you’ll still be pissed off if you get a phone call that starts with “We need to talk”.

So four weeks ago, when I got an email from my boss’s boss, I should have started thinking about George Clooney. But even when you know what’s coming, it’s still a shock. I turned up on time and saw the folder sitting on his desk. But I was still in denial until he started talking about global slowdowns and reorganisations. It was all over in 15 minutes, during which time my email was disabled and somebody was putting my personal belonging into a bin liner.

That’s how things work in Investment Banks. I would have liked to say goodbye to some people (and give a single digit salute to some others) but my biggest regret was not being able to retrieve personal email contacts and all the other stuff I’d saved on my work PC.

They say you shouldn’t slag off your ex employers and I won’t mention their names here. But I’ve given 15 years of my life to them and I would have appreciated a more graceful farewell. But they did give me a nice pay off and forced me to make decisions I’ve been putting off for too long.

Plus their share price is down 97% since I started with them in 1998. So my plan to take Capitalism down from the inside has shown some signs of success.

I moved into a new role nine months ago which turned out to be the sort of career move that Mr Bean would make. But you only realise that with the benefit of hindsight. I didn’t like my boss before I took the offer of a job in his team. He didn’t like me either and only offered me the job because he was desperate to get me out of my old role where I had the temerity to point out the error of all of his idiotic ideas. He realised that it would be better to have me inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in. Of course, when the next round of redundancies came along, he pounced on the chance to rid himself of his meddlesome priest for once and for all.

It’s a salutary tale and reminds me of the story of the frog and the scorpion. I’m arrogant enough to think that the business will suffer without me. But even if my boss suspected that this would happen I think he would have given me the bullet anyway and as we both sink to the bottom he would say, “What else can I do, it’s in my nature”. The lesson for me is that if you know your boss is a scorpion, then don’t take the job in the first place.

They did offer me an outplacement service which against all my suspicions has turned out to be a great benefit. They helped me to put together a pretty nifty CV and to update my Linkedin profile.  I hate that website to be honest but it seems it’s the only way to get a job these days. They also offer desk space in an office environment. It looked to me like the waiting room for God when I first saw it but it is turning out to be useful. I’d forgotten how much personal admin I used to do at work like printing and scanning stuff. It’s also good to just sit at a desk and feel like you are at work.

I find this is the only way to get things done because I’ve discovered the first rule of parenting. It expands to fill the time available. I have an energetic two year old and while I’ve enjoyed spending more time with her, she has an amazing ability to suck up all my energy.

So I’ve spread the job search tentacles far and wide and even started cold calling people. Which believe me is scarier for me than jumping out of a plane or sticking my arm into a bag of snakes. I’m looking at moving back to Europe for a while because I miss cold weather and warm beer. I’ve got my CV out there with people in Sydney, Auckland, Singapore, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Luxembourg. Lots of possibilities, a few probabilities but no definites.

And while I have a enjoyed a couple of small holidays including an excellent week in New Zealand a bit of certainty would certainly help. I do have a family to look after, after all. I have done a few interviews with companies in Europe. Most of them have some consideration for the time zone difference and have called me early in the morning European time. Except my old employers who fixed a call with me for 1am and then put it back to 1.30am and then didn’t bother dialing in.

I guess that sums them up to be honest. They never really cared about people and my only regret is that I stayed there so long. But’s it time to move on and to begin what my wife and I are calling “Our year of living dangerously”. Maybe the new adventure does start now.

The Book Club

“I wouldn’t read that book if I was stuck in the dunny with a bad case of the squirts and I only had that and the back of the aerosol can to read”.

That was my introduction to the first meeting of the book club I recently joined. In fairness, I expected better, given that the meeting was in the kitchen of the Presbytery of my local Catholic church.

I’ve been looking for a little intellectual company since my kid was born. Reading Charlie and Lola books is all very well but it doesn’t exactly stimulate the mind. I knew something was up when we borrowed a “Little Red Train” book from the library and my daughter lost interest half way through the first reading. I forced her to sit through it until the end so that I could see if the train made it back to the station.

My wife and I used to be regulars at “Spirituality in the pub” which is aimed at Catholics who have stopped going to weekly mass but still have a need for an intellectual debate. They bring along guest speakers who are usually challenging in some way and it’s appropriately held in a pub with an al a carte menu as most of the people there are al a carte Catholics.

It was there that I learned of a Men’s Book Group connected to the local Parish. Since the dawn of the Internet, I found that I’ve stopped reading books, apart from large tomes on Military History. And I found that I only bought those because I liked the pictures in the middle.

So I was keen to get back on the reading wagon and the discipline of a book a month seemed to fit my limited time availability. 

Nevertheless, I approached my first meeting with some trepidation. The guys I’d met in the pub where all older and struck me as the sort who would look after the collection at mass and criticise the Priest for being too liberal.

So it was somewhat of a relief to be met by Gerry and his potty mouth. He is a retired developer and likes to stress his working class roots. The rest of the members are lawyers or doctors, with a retired judge thrown in for extra gravitas. Most of them are too polite to criticise the book we’re reviewing or to challenge the opinions of the other members. Apart from Gerry that is. It surprises me that he even turns up because he clearly dislikes books. I’ve been to four meetings so far and he has yet to finish any of the works we’re studying. It doesn’t stop him giving his opinions however, which are liberally peppered with more F and C bombs than you would get at a Richard Prior concert.

My first meeting reviewed “Caleb’s Crossing” by Geraldine Brooks. Most of us saw it as a harmless read. But Gerry’s take on it was that it was an effin potboiler that Barbara Cartland would have been proud of. I’ve never read any of Miss Catlland’s books, but I suspect that she rarely deals with the early interaction of white settlers in Massachusetts with the local Indian population. 

 Gerry’s Effing and blinding was too much for one of the more conservative members. He expressed the commonly held view that Gerry could make his point without so many references to carnal acts or female body parts.

Gerry response was instantaneous. “If you don’t like the effin heat, then eff off back to New Zealand and take all the other effin sheep shaggers with you”.

I was waiting for fists to fly which wasn’t my expectation when I signed up. Thankfully the chairman calmed things down by tabling the next book for review and moving the conversation to less controversial matters such as whether tea or wine would be more suitable for our gatherings.

Gerry muttered under his breath that he would need to be pretty pissed to read some of the shite that was on our upcoming list. 

I haven’t spent much time in the kitchen of a Priest’s house before. My mother was a woman ahead of her times and she brought us up with a healthy suspicion of Priests and their living quarters in particular. But I had imagined that it would be a spiritual and serene place. In truth, the kitchen is much like any other kitchen, apart from the fridge which contains more alcohol than a sailor on shore leave.

At the Christmas meeting, Gerry was more thoughtful, having been given a dressing down by the chairman. He still hated the book mind you and didn’t mind telling us that.

I thought he was a changed character, but the last meeting showed that he was back to his old self. This month’s book was “The Streetsweeper” by Elliot Perlman. He’s a Jewish writer from Melbourne and the book is a dark and troubling comparison of black civil rights in the US with the Holocaust. I wasn’t a big fan to be honest but kept my opinions on the right side of politeness.

Gerry, however, let go with both barrels. He hadn’t made it past the half-way point of the book, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He told us about the Jewish people he’d worked with in the building trade and his less than favourable opinions of their work practices. He ranted on for another ten minutes or so with opinions that Hitler would have left out of Mein Kampft for fear of offending people.

The Kiwi, who he had offended at our earlier meeting, was growing more apoplectic by the minute and had to excuse himself before he exploded. 

I stuck it out until the end when they had calmed Gerry down with glass of passable red. As I was leaving, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Banker.

His eyes lit up and he said “Do you know the difference between a Banker and a Wanker? Nothing they both……..”.  Luckily I was already at the door thinking intellectual conversation is not what it used to be.